Phase modulation conveys information through variations in phase imparted on a carrier signal and is particularly useful when such information can be represented in a finite number of phase angles. Phase-shift keying (PSK) is an example of such modulation, in which a certain bit pattern is encoded as a phase shift or phase differential in a carrier signal. In typical early PSK systems, the number of phase angles that an encoder had to implement was small, typically eight (8) or less. However, current trends are toward representing digital data through an ever increasing number of phase differentials. For example, signal combining techniques may select a single phase to represent a number of different signals, where the phase that is selected is typically conditioned on the bit patterns of the signals that are to be combined at a given sample time. Depending on the signal combining strategy, as the number of signals that are to be combined increases, so too does the number of phases that the encoder must realize. Accordingly, techniques to minimize the computational overhead of these finer phase differential encoding process are in continual development.